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Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The Somewhat Sad-ish Sampler, or: How I Learned to Embroider, Kinda.

After deciding to dip my toe into the delicious-flossy-rainbow pool that is embroidery, I realized that it would be prudent to, well, uhm... actually learn to embroider? I think maybe I'd done it a few times before, but I can't imagine I had produced anything with any degree of aesthetic appeal or skilled craftsmanship.

Which is to say, I sucked at it. Thus was born, The Somewhat Sad-ish Sampler! Shifty, shaky, and utterly without skill! It was insanely fun to make.

You could probably guess, but this was not a well-planned project. Basically, I decided to start randomly embroidering concentric squares in different stitches, and it just became a sampler by default. Did I have any idea what I was doing? No. But I DID have a book on embroidery, and a lot of West Wing episodes to burn through. Netflix streaming is the jet fuel of the 21st century crafter.

I think I learned a lot, because that's easiest to do if you know almost nothing. And it was just so much fun to play with pretty colors and spent almost no time thinking about what I was doing-- bumbling along, picking stitches at random and being generally unconcerned by the many, many mistakes and irregularities in the design. When you're in the habit of thinking about projects as (to some degree) commodities, it's really refreshing to make something so haphazard and unappealing that there would never be any question of re-making or marketing it.

Clearly I'm still no expert, but it was great practice for the MANY hours that I would put into sewing up the Studio Stitches sewing machines, several of which I stitched multiple times before I had acceptable samples. More on those soon-- I promise, I really am getting around to giving some of them away; this week it IS happening.

(For the record, I didn't embroider it in this hoop, but since I had put no forethought into display, there's really no good way to do it. Stitch tension, heh, heh... it was an issue.)